Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Author:Letty Cottin Pogrebin [Pogrebin, Letty Cottin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558618930
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

A COUPLE OF weeks after Zach’s thirty-fifth birthday, he and Cleo were sunning near the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park when some kids whizzed by on skateboards, skimming the pavement like pond flies and click-clacking down the stairways, their boards, though unmoored, flying with them as if hooked to a toe, and solid as a landing strip when they slammed to earth. Since Zach was at home on skis, he thought he’d give skateboarding a try and was about to ask if he could borrow a board for a test run when he remembered he was thirty-five. Middle-aged. For his learning curve to pay off in the pleasure of mastery, he would need years of practice. Would he have enough time? Would there be limits to what his body could do? Were a few new thrills worth the risk of an injury?

He decided not to ask the kid for the board.

“You’re frowning,” Cleo said.

“I feel old.”

She followed his gaze. “Don’t be ridiculous. You could do that if you wanted to, but why would you want to?”

That wasn’t the point. The point was, if he didn’t have enough time left to learn to skateboard, he might not have enough time to find his bashert. Each day he spent cleaving to Cleo was another day stolen from his future. For all he knew, she might feel the same way about him. She was coming up on thirty, an earthquake age for everyone, and, given her biological clock, even more seismic. He had been honest with Cleo all along; she knew he was just passing through en route to the life he was supposed to be living. So why was she treading water with him? How long would she stay? What if she left him first?

The following Sunday night, he turned on the radio to listen to her show while preparing his shoes for a long-overdue polishing. He spread newspapers on the kitchen table, pulled the laces out of his cordovans, and opened a fresh can of brown shoe cream. Usually Cleo bounced her monologue off him in advance but she’d mentioned nothing about tonight’s subject.

“Good evening and welcome to Cleopatra’s Needle. The other day, I met with a group of well-educated black women to talk about men and marriage, or rather listen to the women complain about the paucity of educated black men. No surprise there, since fewer than half of black American boys finish high school and more black men are in prison than in college, which leaves a very small pool of appropriate black guys for middle-class, cultured, intellectual black women to choose from. This, in turn, explains why, when one of the classy brothers pairs up with a white woman, some black sisters get mad. My informants also commented on how much more common it is for black men to date white women than vice versa. So the first question I want to put to tonight’s listeners is this: What’s the story with black men and white women?”

Zach jammed

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